ASUS Maximus 4 Extreme Review
Looking Closer
Published: 3rd January 2011 | Source: ASUS | Price: £300 tbc |
Closer Inspection
The CPU area is fairly busy with lots of power circuitry surrounding it above and to the left. Otherwise it's the standard motherboard layout we're all used to.
The DIMM sockets have the excellent single-clip retention method that is a boon for anyone who switches memory often, but sufficiently great that even if you only ever insert your RAM once you'll appreciate it. Below that we have the ProbeIt monitoring points, as well as the onboard controls for power and reset. Almost hidden on the edge is the LN2 dip switch so those of you who play with sub-zero cooling can quickly fix the frozen issue.
With the left hand side of the Maximus IV Extreme full of eye-catching colours and heat-sinks it's not a shock to see the bottom right-hand corner rather sparse in comparison. SATA II ports being grey and the SATA 3 ones being red is fairly formulaic. It's a little surprising to see the Southbridge so plain. Even the Formula variants of the previous range had a little more pizazz.
The left hand side of the board contains the extra Molex adaptor for extra GPU power should you be running a multiple card setup. It's also where you can plug in the ROG Bluetooth adaptor we saw on the previous page.
For a new chipset the rear panel is outstandingly familiar. A combined PS2 port, USB ports, Network and audio jacks are exactly where you'd expect them to be.
It may appear at first glance that the motherboard has a North Bridge but alas Sherlock that is actually an Nvidia NF200. Natively the P67 has 16 PCI-express lanes so 1x16 or 8x and 8x for Crossfire or SLI. By Asus adding the NF200 it allows the end user to have enough PCIE lanes to run up to 3 GPU's. So if the board is familiar, which is a good thing considering how well built the ROG line of motherboards are, then what is the big change? Turn over to find out.
Most Recent Comments
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Originally Posted by Zeals
Will you do an update or anything when they release a more stable BIOS? |
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Originally Posted by tinytomlogan
Possibly, depends if they have taken the board back by then. |
You should add static values to each bar to make it easier to compare between them. There are so many graphs associated with reviews such as yours, would be nice to be able to move more quickly through them.
And especially in cases like the wprime95 in your new LGA 1155 review where the 1024M values are so high they stretch the scale, leaving almost no resolution for displaying the 1M results. So you have to hover the mouse over each of them.
Also just post them as pictures, the animations don't really add anything to it and pictures will probably load faster. But most importantly you gain compatibility with non flash compatible mobile devices.
I mostly read review and do research when commuting and being out of the house. Most other sites work for that, but yours.
Other than that, thanks for a great site. I appreciate the amount of detail you out into your work.
Looking forward to see how far you can get the i7-2600K on boards like the new UD7 from Gigabyte. I don't really trust the Digi+ VRM and UEFI bios yet.
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Originally Posted by coolgame
will the nh-d14 fit on the other asus p67 boards?can u plz review them as well???? |
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Originally Posted by coolgame
will the nh-d14 fit on the other asus p67 boards?can u plz review them as well???? |
Tim
(first post)
Thx!
Tim
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